In recent years, research has demonstrated that the progression of many diseases is governed by molecular and genetic factors which are patient specific. For example, it is now understood that cancer is driven by diverse genetic and epigenetic factors which are often patient specific. As a result, disease progression and anti-cancer drug response is unique to every patient. In spite of this understanding, most clinical treatments still follow established standard-of-care guidelines and paradigms which fail to account for patient-specific factors.
Personalizing therapeutic treatments in view of the patient-specific molecular and genetic factors offers the opportunity to improve therapeutic outcomes. In order to tailor treatments in a patient specific fashion, tools and methods of predicting and/or rapidly determining the response of a patient to particular drug regimens are needed.
Therefore, it is an object of the invention to provide devices that can be used to locally deliver discrete microdose quantities of one or more active agents to tissues in a patient, and which can be easily removed with tissue remaining spatially positioned relative to the discrete dosages of active agent.
It is also an object of the invention to provide methods for the facile, in vivo, analysis of the sensitivity of a disease or disorder in a patient to one or more active agents.